JEFF VRABEL: An alternative to spidermen and pirates

Friday

May 25, 2007 at 12:01 AMMay 25, 2007 at 6:45 AM

And you thought "Star Wars" was old, "Helvetica: The Movie" celebrates the font's 50th anniversary.

Jeff Vrabel

If you're tired of this summer's already-wearying-and-about-to-get-worse series of silly, sprawling blockbuster films, if you're tired of brain-fried but effects-heavy epics featuring guys in scary spider suits or eyeliner-heavy pirate getups, if you're jonesing for a nice quiet evening at the theater learning about ascenders and descenders, boy, do I have just the thing to steam your pants off.

Behold "Helvetica: The Movie," a new, feature-length independent film dedicated to celebrating the typeface's 50th anniversary this year. I know, right? 50 years! Why it feels like just yesterday Helvetica was a little 6-point toddler, running around the room, getting in the way of the bigger, blockier fonts. I remember when Helvetica was 16-point size and moody, 21-point size and out all the time, 30-point and all settled down. Sigh. Where does the time go.

See, fonts hold a special interest for me, mostly because I am an extremely boring person, but also because I spent a good deal of time as a newspaper designer, which is much like being a traditional graphic designer only without much of the, whaddyacallit, sense of any semblance of creativity (newspaper design is less about reaching artistic goals and more about stuffing briefs, baseball box scores and "Family Circus" down in whatever spaces are left between ads). There was a time not long ago when I could, say, sit down at a restaurant, artfully pick up a menu, and without breaking a sweat identify the name, weight, leading, kerning and degree of italicization of any font contained therein. I was like the font version of Brad Pitt, if he was much more Slovak, 50 pounds lighter and had to ask people to kill spiders for him. But man, I could cold-spot a Garamond - or a variation of Garamond, holla! - from up to 50 yards away. Needless to say, I had to pretty much beat the ladies off with a baseball bat at all times.

But that was a long time ago, and nowadays these kids have all sorts of new crazy fonts, with the hip-hop and the graffiti and the Photoshop and the drop shadowing and the poorly-calibrated typewriter effect that's been used on 70% of all album covers since about 1998 (I'm looking at you, Pearl Jam). No one has any appreciation for SIMPLICITY anymore. Why, in my day, Macintoshes came with THREE FONTS. And one of them CRASHED YOUR COMPUTER IF YOU EVEN THOUGHT ABOUT USING IT. And the other one was that god-awful San Francisco font that looked like something you'd use to announce an extremely cheap carnival, if you were in the third grade.

No one appreciates the cool, icy grace of the Helvetica anymore, which is why I'm anxious to see this film. According to press materials, the film, directed by Gary Hustwit, is an "exploration of urban spaces in major cities and the type that inhabits them." OK, sure, you may be thinking that you'd rather take an afternoon-long nap in a bathtub full of hot ranch dressing than watch this movie, but consider this: "Helvetica" has no midichlorians. It never once will feature a character intoning desperately, "You just don't GET IT, do you?" No adorable 6-year-olds will teach a crusty adult a Life Lesson, nor will they be depicted as preternatually clever businesspeople. No babies will talk. No one playing the president will ever gasp, "Then God help us all." Jamie Kennedy plays no role whatsoever. There will be no romantic-comedy montage set to a song by Train or Maroon 5. Michael Bay will have nothing to do with it. "Helvetica," the film's Web site concludes, "invites us to take a second look at the thousands of words we see every day." And besides, if you do go see it, you can probably hear the pirate explosions in the next theater anyway.

Jeff Vrabel is a freelance writer who wrote this column in 12-point Georgia, which gets a little crowded in the long paragraphs, frankly. He can be reached at his blog, www.jeffvrabel.com, whose fonts he hasn't figured out how to control.